Infrastructure Before Expansion
Why Greater Cambridge is looking back to move forward…
For all the talk of a new approach to growth in Greater Cambridge, the principle now underpinning the proposed development corporation has a distinctly familiar ring.
The government’s ambition is clear: infrastructure should not be an afterthought to development. The new Greater Cambridge Development Corporation is intended to coordinate the delivery of transport, utilities, community facilities and other essential infrastructure alongside growth, with the government explicitly framing the approach as ‘infrastructure-first’.
That sounds like a significant departure from the model with which the planning system is often associated (often unfairly!): allocate land, grant permissions, build homes and then spend years trying to catch up with the roads, schools, water supply and public transport needed to support them. But the underlying idea is not new. Indeed, it echoes one of the central principles behind the post-war New Towns programme – and particularly Milton Keynes.
Learning from Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes was planned on the basis that growth needed to be supported by strategic infrastructure from the outset. Its grid road network, land assembly powers and long-term approach to development allowed infrastructure and expansion to be considered as parts of the same exercise, rather than as separate problems to be solved in sequence.
The city still promotes the idea of ‘I before E’ – Infrastructure before Expansion. The phrase may sound like a neat piece of planning shorthand, but it encapsulates a challenge that Greater Cambridge knows only too well.
Cambridge’s economic success has placed enormous pressure on its physical and social infrastructure. Housing affordability, water availability, transport capacity and congestion are all recognised as constraints on future growth. The government’s consultation on the Development Corporation argued that fragmented decision-making, infrastructure deficiencies and uncertainty over long-term funding have made it difficult to deliver the scale of intervention required.
The proposed answer is to create a body capable of bringing together powers over land, investment and strategic development, while coordinating with local authorities, transport bodies and utility providers. The government has also said that the Development Corporation will be able to help plan, fund and deliver enabling infrastructure, including utilities, transport, green space and social infrastructure. That is where the comparison with Milton Keynes becomes particularly interesting.
A Different Challenge for Greater Cambridge
Development corporations have historically offered something that the conventional planning system can struggle to provide: a single organisation with a long-term remit, significant powers and the ability to connect land, infrastructure and development finance. The government itself has pointed to the history of Milton Keynes and London Docklands as evidence that major growth initiatives can benefit from being centrally-led by a development corporation.
Of course, reproducing the Milton Keynes model in Cambridge would be neither possible nor desirable. Greater Cambridge is a very different place, with different environmental constraints, an established historic city and a complex political geography. Cambridge City Council has also raised concerns about the proposed corporation’s planning powers, local democratic influence and the practical funding of ‘infrastructure-first growth. And that points to the real test.
Infrastructure First, but What Does That Mean?
‘Infrastructure first’ is an attractive principle, but its success will depend on whether it means genuinely front-loading investment and coordinating delivery – or simply producing another set of infrastructure strategies while development continues to outpace provision.
The Greater Cambridge Development Corporation therefore represents more than a new institutional arrangement. It’s a test of whether an old New Town lesson can still work in a 21st-century growth economy: get the infrastructure right, and expansion has somewhere sustainable to go.
Get the sequence wrong, and the familiar story of homes first and infrastructure later risks repeating itself.
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